Lake Shasta Caverns

Lake Shasta Caverns. Photo courtesy of Lake Shasta Caverns

Lake Shasta Caverns is an extraordinarily well-decorated solution cave that contains an especially diverse assemblage of calcite cave formations ranging from millimeters to tens of meters. The caverns are developed in the lower Permian McCloud Limestone, an unusual carbonate rock for the region in that it is not highly re-crystallized or metamorphosed, thus preserving a diverse fossil fauna and flora marine record from 270 million years ago.